“By all the devils, Dick, I can’t stand this sort of thing much longer. We shall go mad or drink ourselves to death”—(we’d all been pretty well “on” the night before)—“if we stick here till we’re trapped or smoked out like a ‘guana out of a tree spout. We must make a rise somehow, and try for blue water again. I’ve been fighting against the notion the whole time we’ve been here, but the devil and your old dad (who’s a near relative, I believe) have been too strong for us. Of course you know what it’s bound to be?”

“I suppose so. I know when dad was. away last week he saw that beggar and some of his mates. They’d partly made it up a while back, but didn’t fancy doing it altogether by themselves. They’ve been waiting on the chance of our standing in and your taking command.”

“Of course, the old story,” he says, throwing his cigar away, and giving a half laugh—such a laugh it was, too. “Captain Starlight again, I suppose. The paltry vanity of leadership, and of being in the front of my fellow-men, has been the ruin of me ever since I could recollect. If my people had let me go into the army, as I begged and prayed of them to do, it might have been all the other way. I recollect that day and hour when my old governor refused my boyish petition, laughed at me—sneered at me. I took the wrong road then. I swear to you, Dick, I never had thought of evil till that cursed day which made me reckless and indifferent to everything. And this is the end—a wasted life, a felon’s doom! Quite melodramatic, isn’t it, Richard? Well, we’ll play out the last act with spirit. ‘Enter first robber,’ and so on. Good-night.”

He walked away. I never heard him say so much about himself before. It set me thinking of what luck and chance there seemed to be in this world. How men were not let do what they knew was best for ‘em—often and often—but something seemed to drive ’em farther and farther along the wrong road, like a lot of stray wild cattle that wants to make back to their own run, and a dog here, a fence the other way, a man on foot or a flock of sheep always frightening ‘em farther and farther from the old beat till they get back into a bit of back country or mallee scrub and stop there for good. Cattle and horses and men and women are awful like one another in their ways, and the more you watch ‘em the more it strikes you.